Material Created To Repel Liquids
Sculpting a surface sedate of tightly packed nanostructures that resemble tiny nails, University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers and their colleagues from Bell Laboratories have created a material that can repel almost a single one mellifluous.
Add a jolt of electricity, and the liquid upon the surface slips spent the heads of the nanonails and spreads out betwixt their shanks, wetting the outside completely.
The new momentous, which was reported this month in Langmuir, a journal of the American Chemical Society, could declare a verdict use in biomedical applications such as “lab-on-a- chip” technology, the manufacture of self-cleaning surfaces, and could help extend the acting life of batteries as a way to turn them off when not in use.
UW-Madison mechanical engineers Tom Krupenkin and J. Ashley Taylor and their team etched a silicon wafer to create a forest of conductive silicon shanks and non-conducting silicon oxide heads. Intriguingly, the ability of the surface of the structure to repulse water, oil, and solvents rests without ceasing the nanonail geometry.
“It turns out that what’s important is not the chemistry of the surface, but the topography of the surface,” Krupenkin explains, noting that the overhang of the nail head is what gives his novel surface its dual personality.
A surface of posts, he notes, creates a platform in the way that rough at the nanoscale that “liquid only touches the surface at the extreme ends of the posts. It’s almost like sitting on a layer of air.”
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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press receipt in full.
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Source: Tom Krupenkin
University of Wisconsin-Madison